Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha
As a writer and development worker, I have travelled extensively, exploring the faraway and uncertain terrains of India, a large, complex and diverse entity. The Sundarbans is a fragile, biodiverse zone in Eastern India, where human existence has been made immensely difficult by the fact that forests are protected in the south. The crisscrossing of turbulent rivers surrounding the islands has always fascinated me as it challenges the reality of human development. Around four million people live in this region. In the last decade, I have had the chance to explore the Sundarbans several times. Each time I come back with a feeling of deep anguish and determination to initiate change after meeting women (single and in groups) in desolate villages where men have mostly migrated for work.
Cyclone Aila hit the Sundarbans in 2009, causing severe damage to the embankments and land, destroying the already thin support system that the poor had. The day I spent in the village Mohanpur, months after Aila, has remained vivid in my memory.
It was on this day that I met Taramoni, a single woman in a household, who to me represented all the courage and fragility of a woman who has been left with the task of running and managing a household alone while waiting for better days.
The narrative that follows is the story of Taramoni in a village of no men. But it is also a story of each and every woman of the Sundarbans.
Cyclone Aila struck in summer.
It was dawn. Satyen, Taramoni’s husband, had gone to the field behind the house to clear his bowels. He came rushing back: ‘The water’s broken through the big embankment! We have to leave at once!’
Within moments, the salt water had entered the village.
It was already flooding into the house.
Somehow Taramoni and Satyen managed to wake up the two sleeping boys, make a bundle with whatever dry clothes were within reach, collect the money tucked above the bamboo beams beneath the roof and leave, taking shelter in the raised verandah of the middle school.
They saw numerous other families like theirs from the village rushing in, one by one, with a few meagre possessions.
The speed of the wind rose as the day advanced. The raging storm was uprooting trees and dislodging tin roofs from houses. They let Bhanumoti the cow loose so that she could escape the flood, but what if she was killed by a flying tin roof or a falling tree?
How could the strong and sturdy embankments, built during the era of the zamindars1, actually break? That morning when Aila came, bringing with it such chaos, there was little time to ponder this.
Taramoni had seen it rain all night, and witnessed the upheaval of the tides on countless occasions. Storms, hurricanes and tornados were a regular feature in the Sundarbans. There had been a cyclone the year before Tara’s wedding. This time, however, the water rose when the tide flowed in, but refused to subside when the tide ebbed. And yet how they suffered from a lack of water! There was no water to drink, to bathe, to clean themselves after going to the toilet. Neither for humans nor for animals. People were dying, gasping for water. The stagnant water in the rivers was giving off a stench, as though something organic were rotting in it. Flies swarmed everywhere – on the floor, on beds, on utensils. People were crowded together on the verandah and in the hall. Wailing babies, old men beating their breasts.
Weeks and months passed, but the wounds still did not heal. The memory of that dawn sent shivers down Taramoni’s spine, every single day.
But at least they had survived.
Six months on, Taramoni found herself gazing emptily at the drumstick tree near the front verandah. Bereft of leaves and fruit, the tree looked like an emaciated spirit, dying slowly. A flock of chirping grey sparrows was tumbling in play under the tree. Taramoni could hear them faintly, like murmurs floating in from the distance. The afternoon was strangely calm: the winter sky a deep blue, without clouds. A dove was calling from the distance amid the silence in the bamboo grove. It did not ring gladly in Taramoni’s heart. The river Gomar was in high tide at midday. The water made splashing sounds in the wind.
She was grateful that they at least had drinking water now; all the hand-pumps were back in operation. Still, Taramoni walked half a kilometre every day to fetch water for drinking and for cooking, storing it in buckets.
Finding drinking water wasn’t Taramoni’s only problem. She tethered the cow to the drumstick tree and let it graze – but there was no grass. She had to collect leaves and straw from the edge of the forest and store them. There had been no rice this year, and no hay either. The once-bounteous cow’s ribs and bones were visible now, and her tears had dried beneath her eyes. She had a strong appetite. But because Bhanumati the cow understood Taramoni’s sorrows, she did not low very often these days, only staring straight ahead with her large eyes, the lids always open, and licking Tara’s hands.
The hours were ticking past, the hours of a winter day.
It was time to let the cow loose and tether her in the shade. But where was the shade? The trees had been submerged in waist-high water. The roots had rotted away underwater. Salt water had gathered in the rice fields. Water was everywhere, and there was no question of re-entering their old home, but still Taramoni’s heart was yearning on the verandah of the schoolhouse.
After Aila had struck, Taramoni waded back from the safe shelter of the school for a glimpse of her beloved home, bursting into tears at the sight of the devastation. The tin roof had been blown off by the wind, landing in a distant field. The swaying walls had collapsed over one another, although the walls of the kitchen at the back had miraculously survived. During Diwali, Taramoni had added a layer of red clay to the front wall and drawn on it with her own hands. As though the wall were a gigantic screen and Taramoni, a rapt artist. She had drawn such beautiful hibiscus flowers, scarlet with green leaves – not like actual hibiscus, but so what? Satyen had made fun of her art, and Taramoni’s indignation and embarrassment had reddened her cheeks. The home that they had made bit by bit, with so much love, like the painted wall, with so much blood and sweat over twenty years, had been demolished in just a few seconds.
Her favourite wicker basket, the dolls displayed in the wooden cupboard, the silk clothes for herself and her family, bought with patiently accumulated savings, were all underwater, rotting away. Water snakes were moving about in the room, scorpions too, the bedclothes covered with swarming black flies.
They had not been able to get their possessions – who was going to risk his or her life to retrieve them? It was Taramoni who had asked her husband and sons not to try.
Satyen had not grieved openly as she had. Men had appearances to maintain – they would not weep, even if they wanted to, in the presence of others. But Taramoni knew of the tempest in her husband’s heart. He was a singer. His harmonium and cymbals had all been damaged by the water.
Even now, six months on, a cold current of fear gripped the people of Mohanpur when the round full moon rose in the sky and a liquid silver melded into the water of the Gomar. During high tide there was always the anxiety that the fast-flowing water could attack through cracks in the embankment. The damage to the Mohanpur embankment had not yet been repaired.
Taramoni’s new home was built with bamboo poles, bamboo screen walls, and a sheet of black polythene tied to them with ropes. Fortunately the kitchen wall of the former house had survived, or else they would have had to cook in the open.
‘This is our new home. Do you like it?’ Taramoni asked me, on that day of my visit to Mohanpur. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her tears were overflowing on her cheeks.
The new house, comprising a single room, was twelve feet long and twelve feet wide. They couldn’t make a larger house. The government had given them ten thousand rupees after Aila to rebuild their home. It was impossible to build a house with that kind of money. Many of the people in the village had spent it on food. Taramoni had kept the money safe, without letting anyone use it to buy anything else.
‘If you did build a house, why couldn’t you have made it a little sturdier, Taramoni?’ I asked her gently.
‘What kind of sturdy house are you talking about? The paddy harvest was ruined completely – the rice fields were under salt water for a month. The plants just stood there and died. It’s Durga Pujo time, and we have neither rice nor hay at home. What am I supposed to make the roof with? We cannot wedge in wooden planks – this is the Sundarbans. The police will despatch us to Alipur Jail if we so much as touch the trees. So all we were left with was bamboo, and these polythene sheets the government gave us.’
It wasn’t just the makeshift house and the daily task of transporting water that Taramoni had to worry about. No plants were growing in Mohanpur. The plants and trees around most people’s houses had been killed by the salt water. Winter crops had been sown on more than half the land, but the crops, too, had been spoilt by the salt water standing in the fields after breaking through the embankment. The rural economy had collapsed in the absence of a harvest. There was no hay, no work on winnowing. The self-reliant team of women who used to trade in rice had no work either. Most worryingly, farmers had no seeds to plant for the next season.
Wives and daughters like Taramoni were carrying the burden of the entire family. Now they had to buy all their vegetables, which posed a new crisis. Earlier, small farmers used to get rice for their families every year while their kitchen gardens yielded vegetables like drumsticks, eggplant, gourd, pumpkins and tomatoes. They spent money only on oil, salt, sugar and clothes. But now they had to buy everything they ate, which meant they needed cash.
The village of Mohanpur had been emptied of its men. Only the women and old people incapable of physical work had stayed behind.
Even Taramoni’s husband, a talented musician, had been forced to leave in search of a living. There was simply no work to be had in the village, not even as a labourer. And Satyen Sardar’s harmonium and musical instruments had fallen silent, ruined by the water and the mud.
Labour contractors had come scouring all of the Sundarbans. There were two or three of them for each village, finding work elsewhere for the residents. And so the people from the Sundarbans went to work at brick kilns and cotton mills in other states, sometimes at cold storages in other districts of West Bengal. Those who went to work as masons got work in Chennai, Hyderabad or Bangalore at 300 rupees a day or more. The company also made living arrangements for them on the site. The village people sent their earnings home every month.
But this life was associated with unknown dangers. Sometimes the men returned to the village seriously ill or injured, without money. This being an unorganised sector, the contractors did not look after the workers’ interests: for example, the owners of the brick kilns seldom paid properly, and fate often held physical torture for workers; there was frequent news of brick-kiln workers, who had left their homes and families behind, being rescued by the police or by voluntary organisations. They had to return home without insurance or compensation.
Taramoni had two sons. One was twenty and the other eighteen. They too had left the village after Aila.
I asked her where her sons had gone.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The contractor who gave them work had said he would let us know, but he hasn’t been to the village since then. I don’t know their address either. Nor did they say when they would return.’
‘Have they sent any money through money orders?’
‘No.’ Taramoni shook her head. ‘They are young, they haven’t learned any trade. They will ruin their health if they’re working at a brick kiln. And if …’ Taramoni fell silent. I knew the apprehension that had cast a shadow over her – the fear that her boys would come back with diseases or disabilities. As their mother she couldn’t express her inner fears.
Traditionally, when the farming season ended, the men had taken their boats into the jungle to fetch honey and wood fragments, and to catch fish and crabs. The water was infested with crocodiles and snakes.
The women did not go into the forest alone in boats. But by way of work now, they had just one option: trapping shrimp prawns in the river below the embankment with homespun towels. It wasn’t just shrimp that got trapped but also other small fry. They caught the fish while wrapped in drenched clothes on winter evenings, averting crocodile attacks. The owners of hatcheries bought the shrimp. Some people sold the rest of the catch, while others cooked it with a little oil. But catching the small fish meant destroying biodiversity, and the number of fish wasn’t increasing. The women said they were helpless. They only caught the fish because they had no other choice.
No woman who had to guard her house in a village of no men could sleep well, and the deep dark circles under Taramoni’s eyes indicated that she had not slept peacefully for many nights.
‘Didi, do you have sleeping pills? Will you give me some?’ Taramoni held out her hand to me.
Tigers were partly to blame for her insomnia. Royal Bengal Tigers. There were dense forests to the south of Gosaba Block. The distance between the two banks of the Gomar was not far at Mohanpur. Wire fences had been erected along the riverbank, but there were gaps in it for people to pass. This was the route tigers took into the river. And then they swam up to the villages. They took away calves or goats or anything they could find. Ancient occupants of the forests that they were, the tigers’ sanctuary had been destroyed by human habitation. Their sources of food had been reduced. The tigers had not forgiven humans.
‘I can’t sleep nights,’ Taramoni said. ‘I live in this large desolate room protected by bamboo. I stay awake worrying, what if a tiger attacks me? I keep jute stalks and matches close by. Only when the breeze at dawn makes me drowsy do I go to sleep.’
The day was declining. The colour of the sunlight had changed. Daytime yellow had acquired a hue of saffron. The water of the Gomar splashed louder in the restless afternoon wind.
Pointing to the south-east, Taramoni said, ‘Midnapore district lies that way. That’s where my parents lived, in Rangini village in Ghatal. I got married at fifteen and came to Mohanpur. I came to Satyen’s house. My father was swept away with joy by my husband’s singing. My husband never owned much land or anything, but we were happy. Both our sons were born in that house you saw destroyed by the flood. That was where they crawled, played, grew up. On full-moon nights my husband would take his harmonium down to the river and sing, with someone playing the drums. I played the cymbals. We were happy …’
My motorboat left Mohanpur for Rangabelia before the darkness turned dense. Taramoni stood on the bank. Her figure grew smaller and dimmer, while the line of the bank vanished. A torrent of water at the confluence of the Gomar and the Vidya made the boat sway on the waves of the high tide.
Taramoni Sardar had told me, ‘Write about me, didi. Publish it. People will read.’ Here, I have written Taramoni’s story. Along with the stories of hundreds of solitary women like her who stayed awake nights.
I still regret that I couldn’t give her sleeping pills.
1. Landowners who leased their land to tenant farmers